


Punch and Judy

by Mortissimo



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Horror, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-16
Updated: 2010-09-16
Packaged: 2017-10-11 21:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortissimo/pseuds/Mortissimo





	1. Tragical

I awake with a start, the taste of blood and a strange word in my mouth. "Punch." It is a second or two before I remember the shock that had awakened me, the phantom crunch of a mace in my skull. Warmth drips down my chin, blood. A coldness grows inside me for an irrational moment and I scan the shadows for the strings of a marionette. There is nothing, of course, and upon prodding a little, I find a small, shallow cut on the inside of my lip. I must have bitten myself in my sleep. Wiping the blood from my chin with the back of my hand, I arise from the pile of torn sheets and straw that serves as my sleeping place and out of the haunted house, my corner of the fairgrounds we haunt. I am still considering the significance of my latest strain of night terrors when I glance up and realise that my steps have taken me to his doorstep, the funhouse. I smile with a sore, reddish mouth, having expected as much. One does not learn to analyse as much as I must do without analysing oneself, and I hasn't escaped my own attention that I come here whenever my sleep is troubled. I never have the strength, however, to go in.

I go in. The first room is the hall of mirrors. Joker, having blocked up the back door, finds it amusing to force me to traverse this place whenever I need to tell him anything. I've done it enough to _almost_ know the way, but it's harder to do in the pitch-black of midnight, and so I have to stop to get my bearings. I feel vaguely uncomfortable to be surrounded so by my own reflection. I am pale, gaunt, tall, and my bare chest is heaving as hard as if I had just run a marathon. The terror of my dreams still weighs heavy on me. My eyes are wide behind my glasses, barely a sliver of blue visible around the dilated pupils. My mouth is red, a shock against the pale skin shot with a shard of moonlight. It curves into an involuntary smile. I look like I'm wearing lipstick, something I've only done once, when I was young and my parents were going to be out of the house for hours. I'd only left it on a moment, hadn't really liked the way it felt or looked. I hadn't then had the affinity for red lipstick that I have now. Angry at myself for being so easily led astray, I smear the blood with the backs of my hands until my mouth is mine again, clean, if pink from abuse.

The hall of mirrors ends, of course, and after ascending a riveted metal staircase as quietly as possible, I am on the second floor of the funhouse. A row of a different kind of mirror greets me now, mirrors to stretch and crush, to distort the features and confuse the mind. I breeze past them, head held high, eyes glued to the door at the end of the hall. One of the mirrors is also a door, leading to the room where I imagine he likely lies even now, asleep. Joker rarely sleeps before five in the morning, and then past noon, but we've had a busy day. I have to wrench the splintered wood of the door to the balcony away from its loving, warped frame. The noise is not too loud; I continue on.

At last, I reach my goal. The balcony was once backlit by flashing bulbs and neon paint, a place to stand and find your friends among the brightly coloured tents and gaudy rides. The fairpark is silent now, save for the sound of crows, and the tents are long since gone or tattered beyond repair. The lightbulbs behind me are mostly shattered, a constant irritation I've snagged my elbow on more times than I care to count. I've often suggested to Joker that he remove them, but no, he says he prefers them the way they are. He says someday they might work. I admire his optimism. Magenta paint flakes off the rusty metal as I grip the railing and lean out over the balcony's edge. The railing groans a protest, but I know it's sturdy enough to bear my slight weight. The fact that it continues to creak and jitter brings me to realise that I'm trembling a little bit, though I'd like to say it's from the autumn chill in the air. One would think a monster such as I am would no longer fear his own nightmares. This could not be further from the truth. My nightmares have become more fearsome, as I have an excellent imagination. Freud would have a field day.

I glance behind with a gasp as something warm and smooth slides onto the back of my neck and smile at the irony of being relieved to find Joker standing behind me, grinning. His is not a presence many would find to be a comfort. I'm not sure what I had expected to find. At the base of my skull, his fingers find a curl and tug lightly. I shudder helplessly and hope he can't feel it as he takes a step closer and slides his arm around my shoulders. I find this casual camaraderie to be less unsettling, at least, than the touch of his unnatural skin. His grating voice startles a few crows and me, and I have to twist to see his face.

"Come for a kiss goodnight, Scarecrow?" Is it too much to ask for? To my credit, I don't say this aloud.

"I couldn't sleep," I tell him truthfully.

"So you came to join me? I'm honoured, Scarecrow, but you know I don't think of you that way." He's only mocking me, I think, but my heart still clenches and goes cold for a moment. I know.

"No." Why did I come here? I'm still not sure. "I like standing up here." There's a sense of loss tugging at my heartstrings as he pulls away and leans back against the protesting railing,

staring at me.

"Why?" It's a simple question, but one I can't find an answer to.

"The view, I suppose," I answer lamely, and am not reassured when he laughs at me.

"Why couldn't you sleep?"

"Oh." Not for the first time, I'm glad I don't blush. "I... had a nightmare." I steel myself for more mocking laughter, but nothing comes. I risk a glance at him out of the corner of my eye, and he is staring at me and nodding, hardly smiling at all.

"What did you dream about?"

"Punch and Judy." Another sidelong glance, and he _is_ grinning at me, not unsympathetically.

"Pretty creepy," he agrees, his grin widening, "which one were you? Mr. Punch? The Devil?" My throat goes dry, and my attempt to swallow turns into a nervous cough.

"Judy," I croak. Memories, as clear as a photograph, of _our_ beautiful sexless baby, its brains scattered like confetti over the floor of our one-room home. This never happened, of course. I still have to fight back a wave of fear and nausea. "It was real, though. Not puppets. God, it was real."

"Tell me, Scarecrow, does this mean you're officially out of your mind now?" I think he's trying to lighten the mood, but just thinking about it makes me sick. The club is still clotted and dripping with our baby's blood and its brains as he raises it slowly over his head. He tells me he loves me through a jagged grin as the club comes down, and then- _thwack_.

I must have blacked out for a second because he's dragging me away from the railing, looking for some surface without treacherous glass shards to lean me against. Supported in Joker's arms, I struggle to my feet and lean back against his chest. My heart refuses to settle down.

"Don't fall off the balcony," he warns me, and I can't help but laugh wearily. I'm comfortable in his arms, against my will. He waits a minute or two, bless his black heart, before he asks me, "what happened?"

"The same thing that happens in every Punch and Judy show." Trying to remain somewhat aloof, I pull out of his all too welcome embrace and lean against the door to the hall of twisted mirrors. Damn him, he's still smirking at me.

"Enlighten me. Let's pretend I've never seen a Punch and Judy before. Tell me a story." It always amazes me that Joker grinning the same grin can seem at once to be so childish and so frightening.

"Punch and Judy lived together with their baby and their dog. They fought often." If I were someone else psychoanalysing me, I would say the dream represented my desire for a loving, serious relationship with him, and also my seemingly contradictory terror of him. I'd never realised what an asshole I could be until I was the one on the other side of the tiny notebook. "Punch and Judy fought a _lot_. Sometimes Punch hit Judy. Sometimes Judy hit Punch. Usually, Punch hit Judy." My words are deliberately sing-song, as though I am speaking to a child. In many ways, I think I am. Mostly, I'm speaking this way to keep my voice from cracking. A dream has never unsettled me this much. "One day Judy came home and found their dog Toby with his neck broken. Just went to find Punch to ask him what he had done and found Punch over our child with its little head all smashed in with a club that I gave you for Christmas." I'm at least coherent enough to recognise when I'm getting more than a little bit hysterical. "Then you turned around with that horrible grin and knocked my head in, too." I have to stop and catch my breath, scrubbing at the rivulets running down my cheek. I'm a wreck, and all over a dream.

"Then why would you come here after _that_?" Joker sounds awed and I try an incredulous laugh, ending up with a raw gag.

"Because you said you loved me, right at the end, and I loved you for giving me death." The laughter comes more easily to me, now that I notice I sound like some goddamn fruity vampire. Maybe goddamn, certainly fruity under many definitions, archaic as wel as contemporary, but I will not be a vampire. I compose myself as best I can. I will not be unsettled by a dream.

"They say if you tell someone else what you dream, the dream won't come back." Perhaps it's only me, but his grin does seem more than a little sympathetic. I hadn't noticed when he moved closer, but he's standing close to me now, looking up at me across the scantest of inches that separate our heights. Uncomfortably warm, I'm close enough to smell his breath, and it isn't quite what one would call pleasant. I wonder if Joker's mouth is slicked with lipstick as it looks.

It isn't. That's the first thing that surprises me when his lips slide over mine, that there's nothing colouring them. The second thing is that I don't mind kissing someone who has clearly not brushed his teeth in, at least, the lengthy amount of time that I have known him. I think this slow burn in the pit of my stomach is a feeling I could get used to. It takes the loss of his warmth to make me wake up and realise he's been speaking to me, and an entirely unnecessary shaking of my shoulders to make me remember what he said.

"Scarecrow, I have to admit something to you." He's waiting for a response, but he's going to be waiting a long time if he expects anything coherent out of me.

I nod.

"I've gotta say, what I said earlier, that was an outright lie." Another pause, another nod. Out with it, already. "I think I have given you a goodnight kiss, and I think you ought to join me." Not surprisingly, he grins, and I brace myself for the inevitable punchline that must follow. "Whaddaya say we make some new nightmares?"

Oh heavens, _yes_.


	2. Comedy

The Devil is always in every proper Punch and Judy.

The morning afterwards had been exactly as awkward as I had expected, at least for me. As for Joker, he pretended nothing had happened, and maybe in his world nothing had. Maybe in his world there was a perfectly logical reason I woke up the next morning with my head on his shoulder and my face pressing into his collarbone, even my admittedly sallow complexion appearing leathery and dark against his snow-white ribs. Maybe in his world he hadn't kissed me at all in the first place. Even with all my training in the field of psychiatry, even as well as I pretend to know him, I only ever see the outside edges of what his world must look like. I closed my eyes, I thought, very briefly, and withdrew my arm from around his spare waist.

When I open my eyes again, he's gone. The empty eyes of my own mask, laid out neatly on the mattress beside me along with the rest of my costume, stare stupidly back at me. His room is bitterly cold, even though the Summer heat hasn't quite given up the ghost. It's likely the force of the cold is mostly in my head, but I'm still shivering as I pull on the rough sackcloth costume and, after hesitating, the mask. He isn't in his funhouse at all, the rattling plywood somehow more frightening than even my own dear haunted house in its emptiness.

The hall of mirrors is far more easy to navigate backwards than forwards, though it's not meant to be walked that way. The funhouse is meant to be exited via a gaudy, mottled slide that had been painted magenta a long, long time ago. There are many spots where the paint has worn away, letting past spots of corroded rust like bloodstains. I don't trust the slide. I've gone down it only once, and tore my hand on a spot where the rusted spot had given way entirely to a jagged mouth of empty space. The entire structure squealed and groaned, and the whole thing terrified the hell out of me. Joker uses it to get down all the time, but I prefer to go backwards through the hall of mirrors. The voyage is hardly the ordeal of last night. Breezing through, I catch only a glimpse of my own sunken, watery eyes inside the ragged eyeholes ripped in my mask. I look like I haven't slept a full night in weeks, because, in truth, I have hardly slept in weeks. Last night, though, last night was something different entirely.

I leave the hall of mirrors blinking and cringing at the force of the dazzling sunshine. It's later in the day than I had previously imagined, probably well past noon. I am not, by nature, a late riser, but I'd had a rather active night.

I find Joker on my third try, sitting alone in a cracked vinyl seat of a ferris wheel that has long ceased to be workable and is slowly degenerating into a pile of rusted bits and lead paint flakes. He sits with his head in his gloved hands, staring down through the riveted metal of the platform at the dead grass below. He looks very old right now, and tired, and I begin to wonder how old he really is. The Joker was really the first one among us, the first criminal to be as strange and frightening as Gotham's hero. I've always assumed that we must be around the same age, but I hadn't thought too deeply on the matter before. The thought occurs, with a startled shiver, that Joker had already been well established as Gotham's resident insane criminal mastermind when I'd only just entered medical school. Some of my teachers had used him as a textbook example of everything from neuroses to many, varied psychoses. I'd admired him even then, though slightly differently than I do now, amazed at how brilliantly the truly insane blazed, causing all other minds to pale and shrivel in comparison.

I come back to reality with a start, to realise that he is staring at me, and has probably been staring at me for a long time. Although I am fully aware that we are, technically, on the same side, the intensity of his viridian stare propels me back a step, back onto the yellowed grass.

"Good morning," I call to him, a slight hitch giving away a little of my nervousness at confronting him again. To my inexplicable dismay, the greeting seems to flip a switch inside him, and he grins as he rises and descends the shuddering staircase.

"Good _afternoon_ , you mean," he corrects me loudly, drawing forth an unnecessarily large, orange pocketwatch from his vest. "Why, Scarecrow, it's well past three! How completely unlike you to sleep so late!" Giggling at something only he understands, he pushes past me and continues down the walkway, leaving me at a loss for words for several seconds. I follow him.

"Yes, yes, you're right. Of course. Um, about-"I bite off my words and stumble back a step as he whirls on his heel and descends on me, continuing as though he had never stopped.

"We have _so_ much work to do, you and I. I've got this plan- wait. Have I told you about my plan? I'll tell you now. First, we..." I tune him out entirely, nodding after every 'right?' and obediently snarling in disgust after every 'Batman!' he spits out. To be honest, I couldn't care less what he's saying. The jist of it, what matters, is that it will likely end with the loss of our theme park and the termination of the delicately arranged peace we had obtained. Joker has his arm around my shoulders as he tugs me along, but that means little more than that he's speaking to me. It's no more a gesture of affection than a handshake. Damn my logic. The frenzied voice at my ear building into a crescendo signals his coming to an end, and I tune back into Joker's speech in time to catch, "-and after the toy soldiers have done their job, we come in and-"

"And one or both of us gets shipped off to Arkahm until the beginning of the next cycle." Cursing myself for a fool, I slip out from under his arm to stand before him, staring down at a puzzled Joker. He isn't used to being interrupted, and I allow myself to be amused at his lost expression only for a moment. "To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I really _want_ to-"

"-and we can gloat, or do a dance, or something." As though he hadn't heard a word, which is not outside the realm of possibility, he brushes past me again and begins anew. "Of course, if that doesn't work, I have got another one that is _absolutely guaranteed_ to go off without a hitch. See, first what-" Surrrenduring my last hopes of a meaningful discussion, I let Jonathan Crane give way completely to Scarecrow, and follow after Joker.

This plan, after all, might really work. Who knows? We just might trap outselves a Bat.

It doesn't. We don't.

Slipping around on the roof of a posh apartment building in the blinding rain is not the best time to remember that I am in no kind of shape for a rooftop chase. Scrambling for purchase across shingle, concrete, and skylight, the world becomes something of a blur, pierced unevenly with startling, death-defying jumps to the next roof. I've lost sight of Joker. I assume he must be somewhere in the pouring sleet ahead of me, but I haven't seen him in the past three buildings, and so I begin to suspect that he's either already been captured, or that he has somehow escaped and left me to face the wrath of Batman alone. The latter is far more likely, I realise with a sickening lurch in the pit of my stomach that has nothing to do with staring at the streets of Gotham fifty storeys down. Well, maybe it has a little to do with that. Taking a deep breath, I slide back a step and then launch myself into the air. There is a brief moment of sheer, laughing insanity and adrenaline before my foot catches the edge of the gutter. I almost laugh as I imagine how I must look, gangly arms windmilling wildly in the air in a futile attempt to catch my balance and climb onto more secure ground.

I slip backwards. The slick metal beneath me gives way and I fall, my heart stopping for a long, terrifying moment before I feel a pair of strong hands, gloved in leather, close around my bony wrist. Unable to look up at the face, or possibly cowl, of my saviour, I stare dumbly down as my hat gently drifts down to the alleyway far, far below.

"Scarecrow!" I go weak in the knees at the sound of his grating falsetto, glancing up gratefully into the yellowed grin of the Joker. Gritting his teeth in a grimace of effort, he pulls me up over the ledge and onto the roof. Laughing out of sheer relief, I collapse bonelessly and pull us both to the rough concrete of the roof. He says nothing as I pull my hood off and grab him by the lapels of his garish purple jacket, burying my face in the curve of his neck.

"Thanks," I whisper against his soaked skin. I don't expect him to hear me, but he does, settling spidery hands on my shoulders in a distant sort of embrace.

"You looked like you needed a hand. You're much good as a fall guy, Scarecrow, street pizza is a bad look for you." He's babbling, and I have to admit, I'm touched. I suppose this must be as close to his depraved little world as he allows anybody to get. "As nice as this is, I feel the need to remind you that we _are_ in the middle of a chase scene," he reminds me quietly, surprising and annoying me a little with his unusual practicality. In answer, I grasp him by his tie and kiss him, in a manner that is remarkably difficult to explain to anyone who has never been kissed while being chased by someone who is, if not directly your arch-nemesis, nevertheless the arch-nemesis of the other party involved. His lips are soft as I had remembered, and taste faintly of rainwater, which, in Gotham, is not entirely a pleasant taste.

We part far too soon, each gasping faintly, and against my will, I am the first to speak.

"I think we ought to split up," I mutter reluctantly, curling my fingers more tightly around his tie as though arguing with myself.

"I'm with you on this one," he agrees, sounding about as enthusiastic at the idea as I feel. "I'll keep going, you take the stairs down to the ground." Ignoring a peculiar tightness in my chest, I nod, and we climb unsteadily to our feet. "If we get away, we meet back at home, right?"

"Right," I echo, grimacing as I wring out my burlap mask and pull it back over my head. "And if one of us gets caught...?" The Joker grins.

"Why, the other one has to break him out of Arkham, of course."

"Of course of course." Laughing shortly, I glance nervously to the black sky above and turn to go. Gloved fingers curl around my wrist and I glance back to the Joker.

"Scarecrow, I. . . Just. . ." He opens and shuts his mouth, markedly devoid of amusement. "Watch your back."

"Right," I mutter again, staring awkwardly down at my feet. This time, I know exactly what I want to say, but I can't quite bring myself to say it. "I. . You too." It's as close to an endearment as either of us will likely ever get, nevermind a wordy confession of. . . just about anything, really.

We break away, Joker tearing across the roof and me hurrying to a heavy metal door that, against all odds, is unlocked. The stairwell is lit by a series of guttering flourescent lights that don't so much banish the shadows as eliminate them. The steps are concrete, and I've slipped and slided only three stories down before the stairwell door slams open again with a _bang_. I only have a moment to hope feverishly against hope that Joker's come back for me before a forbidding black shape drops down the center of the stairwell and swings in to drop down onto the landing in front of me. I don't run. There's no point in it. He's close enough to reach out and grab me, and besides, Batman's faster.

Smiling like a lunatic, which I suppose I must be, I offer up my wrists to him. He stares at me for a long while before grabbing me by my collar and hauling me after him with a completely unnecessary show of force. It hardly matters anyway, I'm done running. Batman might have me, but the Devil never catches Mr. Punch. Mr. Punch is far too clever for that.

I know Joker will come for me. He has to. I might not be the principal character, but it's not a Punch and Judy show without Mr. Punch _and_ Mrs. Judy.

On the other hand, the Devil is also always in every proper Punch and Judy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Punch and Judy is a kind of very violent children's puppet show that has been around absolutely forEVER, and there are lots and lots of more instructive theses on it than this story is.
> 
> I don't think I stuck to the theme quite as well here, but it's something. I wasn't planning on a sequel. I've written completely different drafts for both chapters, but both were unsatisfactory. This is the end of the end, though maybe maybe other hardly related bits and pieces might get put up eventually. I'm not sure whether this really belongs to one of the cartoons, one of the movies, or the comics, but I'm putting it here anyway. So there.

**Author's Note:**

> Old. Way old.


End file.
